Will leave you think­ing long af­ter its apt con­clu­sion.

Last year, sur­vivor hor­ror fans were treated to a de­cent, but flawed HD re­mas­ter of 2002’s re­make. While the script and game­play tweaks have aged well, the same couldn’t be said for the pre-ren­dered back­drops, which ranged from pass­able to down­right em­bar­rass­ing. But it’s still a com­mend­able ef­fort, for how else will the gam­ing masses ex­pe­ri­ence the defini­tive in­car­na­tion of the first with to­day’s gam­ing hard­ware?

It’s clear that a lot more care has been taken to pre­serve the orig­i­nal as­sets of so much so that the de­vel­op­ers were able to re-ren­der the mov­ing and non-an­i­mated back­drops in greater de­tail, com­plete with en­hanced char­ac­ter mod­els and dy­namic light­ing and shadow ef­fects. Sim­i­lar to the pre­vi­ous HD re­mas­ter, there’s a widescreen mode that pans the 4:3 back­grounds up or down with the char­ac­ter’s move­ment, an al­ter­nate con­trol scheme, and 5.1-chan­nel au­dio.

As a pre­quel, opted to de­vi­ate from the es­tab­lished for­mula with a dy­namic ‘part­ner zap­ping’ sys­tem that adds to the puz­zle-solv­ing aspects of the game, while the lack of in­ven­tory boxes can be ei­ther a bless­ing or a bur­den. There are also the new Wesker Mode and un­lock­able cos­tumes to sat­isfy both se­ries’ veter­ans and new­com­ers.